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Forum Discussion

Rickster434's avatar
Aug 12, 2020
Solved

xrm570 Wired Backhaul and other issues

Hey Guys and Gals, Background: I have both the XR500 and the EX7700 in the mesh kit and I have been plagued with issues. I have a 400Mbps down 20 Mbps up connection through cable. Everytime I exper...
  • Rickster434's avatar
    Rickster434
    Aug 12, 2020

    Alright XRM570 users.. I have some good news for you. I have fixed my issues. I called tech support and they didn't have the training to help me. Unfortunately, Netgear doesn't think that efficiency in diagnosing problems is a problem, and so tech support and I wasted several hours trying to figure this out. 

     

    The solution was simple and in the manual.

    (users that just want answers... skip to the ---- line.. first I want to send a message to Netgear)

    So these are the problems I see with Netgear's documentation and lack of technical support process and advisment:

    1. Lack of taking the time at the beginning of the call to fully understand the issues and diagnose the problem using simple techniques and troubleshooting documentation that is already available. Example: After about a 2 hour phone call with techsupport: restarting the router, the extender, factory reseting both devices, moving things around, trying to reset them again and finally thinking the problem was solved... I tried to connect two devices to my extender. One forcing a 5ghz signal, and the other a 2.4ghz signal. The 5 ghz signal would process sometimes and the 2.4ghz would simply fail to connect. I decided to restart the extender. I noticed that the lights were acting funky. The green light was flashing. Well, after 10 minutes of it trying to connect I gave up and began my research.

     

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    The firmware was corrupt. Doh. How do I fix that when I can't connect to the thing in the first place? Well I had to do a lot of digging and finally came upon this article which explained how to use a tftp client to upload the firmware. There is no guidance in this article on how to actually open a tftp connection, but I have done this a bunch before when I ran a server farm. 

    Here is the article I discovered:

    https://kb.netgear.com/000059634/How-to-upload-firmware-to-a-NETGEAR-router-using-Windows-TFTP

    To use it however, you need to download a tftp CLIENT from somewhere(search google for tftp client and look for the first link by tftp-server.com) and make sure that the executible for the tftp client and your firmware are in the same location. You  also need to know how to use cd in the command prompt in order to be able to navigate to your specified folder where these two files are located (tftp executable and image file)

     

    Okay so the next problem.. I got my extender up and running again. Found the IP address in the network manager and found the ip of the extender... because the website that you suggest to use that is not permited to be posted in this forum (mywifi3xt.net (minus leet speak)) just doesn't work guys... I logged into the extender and started applying what I know about things and got wired back haul to work:

     

    For wired backhaul you must set the EX7700 in AP mode, and you must use smart connect. Make sure your ssid and password for your wifi network matches that of your XR500 and run through the prompts. Of course you have to have an ethernet connection directly to the router to make this all work. So Yes. Success. 4 full hours of uninterupted QOS, geofilter and everything else that I can do with the awesome XR500 with a now fully supported ethernet backhaul connection to the extender from the router.  Please ask questions if you don't understand. I will be more than happy to help as it seems that I am the only one that knows how to implement a simple networking concept as wired backhaul on the ex7700.

     

    Goodnight.